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Darren Walker, president of the Ford
Foundation. Credit: Joi Ito/Flickr. Some rights reserved.

It
takes a special sort of chutzpah, as
we say in New York, to deliver a homily on privilege from the summit of the Ford Foundation. So kudos to Ford’s
President Darren Walker
who has done just this in his latest
annual letter. “Privilege allied with ignorance,” he writes, “has become an
equally pernicious, and perhaps more pervasive, enemy to justice,” before going on to focus on
disability as a missing piece in the Ford Foundation’s jigsaw of diversity.

If
people are concerned about privilege, of course, there’s an obvious solution—just
give it up: spend out your wealth, roll up your sleeves, and get involved in building
alternatives which don’t start from the same position. If you don’t like
privilege then don’t create or sustain it. Focus instead on building a system that
produces less of the stuff in the first place. Problem solved.

But
Walker takes a different approach.
“The paradox of privilege,” he writes, “is that it shields us from fully
experiencing or acknowledging inequality, even while giving us more power to do
something about it.” In other words, privilege is not a problem but a puzzle, just
as inequality represents an opportunity not just a threat—because it creates
the conditions for more philanthropy.

This
has been a consistent theme in Walker’s writings, including the “New
Gospel of Wealth” which launched the Ford Foundation’s return to a focus on
inequality in 2015. We have an “obligation to capitalism” he writes, since
capitalism is what created the Foundation in the first place, and it’s what makes
philanthropy “both possible and necessary. I believe we are obligated to strengthen
and improve the system of which we are part. Philanthropy’s role is to
contribute to the flourishing of the far greater part—to help foster a stronger
safety net and a level playing field.”

In
developing this position Walker sits squarely within the traditions of American
liberalism, with its belief that promoting equality of opportunity within the current
economic and political system is the best response to its failings. Everyone should
have the same chance to be privileged, you might say, so that they can use
their privilege to attack privilege more efficiently.

There’s
some logic to this line of reasoning, but it rests on two questionable assumptions.

Tax-funded,
redistributive government; people-funded, independent civil society action; and
dynamic but well-regulated businesses are far more important. It was the same
story in America under the New
Deal and the Great
Society, which kept
economic inequality at much lower levels before the new gilded age began around
the turn of the Millennium. In fact in the US, philanthropy has increased in
line with inequality over the last 50 years,
so the more you have of one, the more you have of the other. Statistically
speaking, philanthropy is a symptom of inequality and not a cure.

But
that’s far too crude, you might say. What’s more important is the evidence at
the micro-level that shows all the good things foundations are supporting (including
openDemocracy, where you’re reading this). Unfortunately the conclusion is the same:
there’s
no evidence that this support has had any significant effect on economic inequality
since Ford and the others were established. Of course, the past isn’t
necessarily an accurate guide to the future—maybe foundations will find a
magical solution that turns these findings on their heads—but for now, the many
small successes don’t add up to anything that’s powerful enough to halt society’s
slide into a permanent division between the one per cent and the other 99.

If
that’s the case, then Walker’s second assumption doesn’t add up either: we
don’t have ‘an obligation to strengthen capitalism’ as he puts it, we have a
duty to transform it, since that’s the only way to attack inequality and
privilege at their source. Otherwise the runaway train of inequality will keep
on disappearing into the distance even as we re-double our efforts to catch up with it.
Instead, we have to alter the production and distribution of wealth and power
in fundamental ways—who owns what, who gets what, who pays what and who makes decisions.
No more $44 billion fortunes, and enough shared wealth for everyone to be their
own philanthropist. The changing structure of work and the rise of the tech
economy complicate the answers to these questions, but they don’t change the
questions themselves or the imperatives of transformation.

This
is where privilege is incredibly important. Privilege imposes all sorts of
conscious and unconscious filters that frame each potential course of action as
realistic or utopian, effective or superficial. Even the evidence about ‘what
works’ is processed through these filters. The world looks very different from
the top and bottom of the pile, but if the supply of money for social change is
controlled by those at the top then only a restricted range of possibilities will
be supported—and they won’t include transforming the system that put them there
in the first place: there’s way too much to lose.

That’s
because transformative
solutions rely on sacrifice, sharing and radical equality so that the interests
of the ‘non-privileged’ are prioritized and actualized at every step—the
millions of people who do the work of justice and caring and organizing and
protesting and governing and creating and performing on a daily basis.
Liberalism keeps the relationships between money and social change pretty much
as they are, doling out a few more crumbs from the rich man’s table in the hope
that they’ll eventually make a cake. Transformative approaches accept that the
cake must be baked from a whole new recipe that restructures those
relationships, opening the way for more radical solutions to gain support.

This
is immensely demanding work both personally—in making equality the default
setting of our lives—and politically, in reinventing institutions like the Ford
Foundation so that they can practice what they preach. At present, their strategies
are incompatible with the goals of transformation because privilege, inequality
and control are hardwired into their structure, governance and operations. It’s
that sense of privilege that sees public
schools and low-income communities as laboratories for foundation-funded
experiments, or convinces philanthropists that they know best even though their
on-the-ground experience is generally so limited, or simply that your phone
call or proposal don’t merit a response. Privilege is rarely more seductive
than when cloaked in altruistic garb.

To
his credit, Walker recognizes
many of these issues in his letter. “By acknowledging my individual privilege
and ignorance,” he
writes, “I began to more clearly perceive the Ford
Foundation’s institutional privilege and ignorance as well. Transformation
starts with acknowledging our own fallibility and deficiencies. To do this, we
need to put aside our pride. We need to open our eyes, ears, minds, and hearts
in order to embrace a complete and intersectional view of inequality. Only when
we permit ourselves to be equal parts vigilant and vulnerable, can we model the
kind of honest self-reflection we hope to see across our society. Empathy and
humility must be among justice’s greatest allies.”

I
think that’s true. However, it doesn’t matter how much empathy and humility you
have if you’re not willing to tackle the structural factors that create so much
privilege in the first place. For Ford, it seems that every other form of
inequality can and should be challenged, whether it’s based on race, gender,
sexuality, income, geography or disability, but the structure of the economic
system—the biggest privilege-producing machine on the planet—must be preserved.

As
Walker’s letter shows, some foundations are recognizing that their current
models aren’t working very well, but their search for alternatives is restricted
to a narrow band that can’t provide the answers. Renouncing privilege is central
to widening that band, so Walker is right to place this issue front and center.
But privilege isn’t actually a puzzle—it just takes courage to let it go and
work from a different place.

In
that respect, Walker quotes the writings of James Baldwin with
admiration, but another social justice icon, Audre
Lorde, is a better guide to the Ford Foundation’s future. “The master’s
tools will never dismantle the master’s house” as she put
it in 1979. Imagine what would happen if we re-configured the supply of
money for social change with that advice in mind? It would mean the wholesale
transformation of institutional philanthropy, since for Ford and others like it
an assault on privilege is essentially an assault upon themselves.

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